Worried someone may try to wirelessly nab your personal details from those RFID cards in your wallet? Get some peace of mind with the “identity theft preventing privacy wallet”, its seller claims.
We kid you not. According to its online retailer, the wallet is woven from over 20,000 super-fine strands of stainless steel which …

20,000 super-fine strands of stainless steel?

Stainless Steel? Super Fine?

So stainless steel obviously wouldn't show rust marks, and seeing as how they're probably thinner than your average piece of thread, it's probably not too weighty.

Most stainless steels have generally poor surface conductivity, which would be needed to form the collection of threads into a conductive mesh, which would be needed for a decent Faraday Cage.

I wonder if this thing has enough shielding to just stop the card from working on a normal reader, or if it can actually block the high powered gear of the sort that Defcon attendees lug to Vegas yearly?

Missing the point?

Isn't the point of RFID cards that you don't have to get them out of your wallet to use them? Otherwise we might as well stick with chip and pin, which would be cheaper (and lighter) than carrying around a Faraday cage.

P.S. I wonder if the same company makes a woven steel case for my mobile phone, to make sure that nobody can hack into it!

Unwanted RFID/NFC cards

Yes, the point of RFID/NFC cards is that you don't have to get them out of your wallet to use them. But what if you don't want an RFID/NFC card? It's not as simple as not asking for one any more. If you are a customer of Barclays, for example, you can't get a standard debit card without RFID/NFC built into the card any more. Even if you ask for it, they won't give it to you. I fully expect other UK banks to follow in their footsteps, since this is an initiative being driven by VISA.

I X-rayed my card to see where the antenna is and whether I could cut the antenna. I haven't actually cut it yet, but it should be possible.

The bottom line is that we are no longer given the choice whether to have such cards without having to make much more drastic decisions like not having a bank account at all.

I haven't verified this, but I believe that there's at least one way of abusing Barclays' system in order to rip off unsuspecting people walking around with unprotected wallets.

What??

How is "the point" of RFID cards that they can be used while still in the wallet? There is no way they could have blindly thought that would work...Personally I have 4 cards in my wallet...Cash, 2 Debit and one credit....I really don't fancy the till playing RFID Roulette when I pay for stuff I'd much rather know which account I was paying from.

Ahead of the trend for a change...

Same here

Had a dirfwear passport wallet for years ever since the Incompetence and Assport Service decided to issue me a passport with "secure" RFID. It was a lot cheaper than this one too.

Also it confuses the hell out of the airport staff when you forget to take it out of your pocket for the metal detector, they go over you with the hand scanner, look in the wallet and see a passport and then assume their scanner is acting up...

Magnetism

RFID for the idiocy of it all...

Not really missing the point, as much as not wanting to play the game that the card issuers are trying to force down all of our throats.

I'm not big on the tinfoil hat paranoia, but I can see not wanting to have my banking info easily sniffed, or any other random info that some card issuer decides they want to make RF accessible.

If I need to use a RFID card for a banking transaction (if they ever manage to get rid of the swipe all together?) then I'll pull the silly thing out, and hope that some ambitious crook hasn't gotten to the area of the reader for a physical monitoring hack at the most likely target location...

Hmm, I think I may stick to cash at that point, if it ever comes to that...

WTF for the idiocy in trying to force an insecure system into critical information fields, be it national security, people tracking, or banking.

Keep it for inventory theft tracking and leave the rest well enough alone.

This almost has a real use...

I've got 3 different RFID cards, and they interfere when trying to use them. This means that I've now got 2 different wallets that I carry, and wave the "correct" one at the reader when I need to - the third card (thankfully) doesn't interefere with the second.

If this could be produced with a flap in the middle to let you "unlock" one side, this would give me the ability to use 4 different RFID cards from a single wallet - completely changing my life, guv.

E.g. Card 1 on the outside of the "protection" on the left, card 2 inside on the left, card 3 inside on the right, and card 4 outside on the right. left down -> 1, open, flap to right -> 2, open, flap to left -> 3, right down -> 4.

Of course, hacking the cards apart and putting the coils on some sort of swtich device would work too - but would almost definitely break the card.

So, how's it earthed then?

Re: So, how's it earthed then?

Certainly they're better when earthed but the whole point of a Faraday cage is to equalize the potentials induced by EM waves. Which is why cars and planes make quite good ones; or would if the windows weren't so large.

Incidentally static shielding bags your piece of electronics came in are also good for attenuating RFID cards with 'Wave and Pay' logos on. (As in Wave your card and Pay everyone else's bill)

Earthing

@Sorry that handle is already taken, would you care to explain why the local metro machines can't read my card until I take it out of my wallet? The real issue isn't whether it's earthed (with respect to what, anyway?) but whether it has holes. However, given the size of the aerials on those cards (pretty much the size of the card) the frequency of radio waves used is low enough that you can get away with holes on the order of a cm.

Dubious

More than similar

I don’t know about similar. I’d say it is a Stewart/Stand product. Is yours one of the original designs, without the strengthening on the hinged area? I’ve always assumed he made the change because some wallets had suffered metal fatigue. Fortunately, that wouldn’t have been a problem for me. I rarely open my wallet.

Waste of Money

RFID for banking cards is a misnomer. Bank cards do not use radio waves to communicate, they use a modulated transformer coupling which provides the power for the card was well as the communication path. NFC is exactly that "Near Field Communication". Working in this field I can tell you that trying to get reliable communication to work as 10cm distance is a headache. Don't worry about people sniffing your RFID cards, if someone wants your card they will mug you instead.

There are RFID chips that do use radio waves to communciate but these are simply tags that just return an ID number and do not need the power provided by a transformer coupling that a microcontroller does.

Geek Alert, Pay attention for the Science bit

Thinkgeek sell them too

Basically its a Brillo pad

Being a Brillo pad at heart makes this:

A truly multi-functional wallet, now rather than just one rather boring sedate task, the Steel Knight (TM) offers layers of multi-functional genius and remove those stubborn saucepan streaks after that fine meal that you bought using your Steel knight protected credit cards.